Saturday, August 19, 2017

Feast 2

Feast 2 picks up immediately following the end of Feast- the leader of a bike gang (Diane Ayala Goldner) finds out that her sister (also played by Goldner) had been killed during the events of the first movie and teams up with the bartender (Clu Gulager) who somehow survived the first movie. They head to the next town and find it overrun with monsters. Along with a few surviving locals, they must try to not get eaten by things.

This movie keeps up the highly stylized vibe of the first movie, doing interview-style character introductions to keep it fresh and, also, to minimize time spent on character development.

There's as much, if not more, blood, and definitely more guts, with intestines spilling out of people left, right, and centre, although there was obviously less money and/or time spent on the effects because they looked a lot shittier this trip.

It also continues with the situation style humour, and has a few genuinely funny moments, including one particularly tasteless and infamous scene where an attempt to rescue a baby goes south (you can watch it here, bearing in mind that, like I said, it is in extremely poor taste. Still funny tho).

Mostly, though, it seems like the filmmakers sat down and asked themselves, "what was good about Feast?", then came to the conclusion that it was not the breaking with genre expectations but, in fact, the gross-out humour, coz this movie has that in spades.

Where the last movie had dick and fucking jokes, this one throws in extra farting, shitting, and vomiting for good measure. You know, because it's fun. There's a scene where one of the characters decides to dissect a dead monsters to discover that inside the body there is a gigantic eye and a mouth. This is not important. What is important is that he makes it fart, puke, piss, and shit on the other characters. Because comedy?

What's more, there's no real rhyme or reason given for the sudden increase in monster numbers. In the first one, there were four, which I guess I could buy, but in this one there's monsters all over the place. Where did they come from? What are they? Sometimes, less is more. In the first movie, that worked. The monsters were there because they were there, it didn't matter why. In this one it feels lazy. It's gone from a bizarre freak event to something major and there's not even any slight attempt at rationalization.

Another big issue with the movie is that the characters are all fucking garbage. There is not one person in the movie that I could identify or sympathize with. They're all a bunch of jackasses for whom I have no patience. Sure, they're zany. But adding wrestlers with dwarfism or a guy with a mustache to your movie doesn't actually make it any more compelling.

In the first movie, the characters were all assholes, but at least by the end of the movie the two unlikely heroes had grown enough that I was rooting for them. In this one, the only person I was rooting for was the waitress (Jenny Wade) because even though she backstabbed everybody in the first movie, by god, she had some will to live.

Even the monsters were less cool in this one. In the first one they had weird skull masks and cloaks and looked all freaky and weird. In this one they were just running around naked for some reason. Why? Who the fuck knows.

The other thing that pissed me the fuck off about this movie is that it just ends mid scene. Some of the characters are trying to get into a building, and that doesn't work, and then monsters break in to the place where the other people are, and then the credits role. So they obviously couldn't think of a good ending for the movie, and didn't want to have everybody die so that they had room for a sequel, which is presumptuous as fuck.

This movie basically hits all the same stops as the first one without any of the wit or punch, but isn't actually bad enough to be entertaining. Avoid, if possible.